León is gone.
My first official boyfriend, and first halfway reciprocated love, was killed by a massive heart attack on the 9th of September. I found about it through Russ and other Facebook friends in the wee hours of the following Tuesday.
I’ve told some damning tales about León, the first man (outside my family) to truly break my heart, and at one point I even believed he didn’t wish to be in contact with me. I was decidedly wrong about that. He found and friended me on Facebook, and for the past year and a half we had gotten to know each other again, exchanging private messages and interacting almost daily in the more public forum of news links, photographs, and statuses. León had a so-called “bleeding heart” and a finally tuned sense of outrage, so we were nearly always in agreement politically. In private, he was warm and affectionate, reiterating how glad he was to have reconnected with me. I felt the same way. He had only in the past couple of years finished a doctorate in Art History, and gotten married.
At long last, he told me, he was happy.
**
It took a few hours for the shock to subside and the exposed nerves to begin screaming. I wept in my bed nearly all night long, falling into an exhausted sleep just as pale light began to show behind the curtains. When I resurfaced into consciousness, and into the terrible realization of what had happened, the feeling of awfulness returned in the form of that giant jagged wound in the chest I had only recently been rid of, that feeling that someone was trying to cut out my heart with a rusty saw.
I cried on and off uncontrollably all day, calling in sick to work and staying glued to Facebook, where many of us had virtually come together to mourn and reminisce. I spent an hour and a half on the phone with Nathan Roth, who had been one of my closest friends freshman year, and who had also been the boyfriend of my “close friend” Cheyenne. She was the girlfriend who, for about a week during our sophomore year, believed that she and León were meant to be together. (Never trust a California-bred woman with a precious name.)
**
Yes, that’s an old and tired story: girl meets boy, girl falls hard for boy, girl loses boy to friend who, it turns out, didn’t really want him anyway. It all played out in a particularly painful way – and not just for me – with Cheyenne breaking up with León over the phone (to go back to Nathan) while León was home in Nebraska at his disabled brother’s funeral. He returned to school a shattered man, and in the midst of my own reeling betrayal and emotional disintegration I hovered by his side, trying to gather up the pieces. Our band of friends had fallen apart, splintered into hostile factions. León just couldn’t cope with all the loss. He packed up and left school; I took to my bed with a gallon jug of cheap wine, skipping classes and contemplating a fatal jump into the Chesapeake. Life seemed over. I never spoke to Cheyenne again.
(What was it about her? I asked Nathan the other day. What was it about this liberal-arts-school Helen of Troy that caused such a destructive war? “I don’t know,” he answered. “She was stupid…and not very attractive…I guess I just wanted to be in a relationship.”)
**
But before all that, before all that…there was just León and I.
In my post about destroying my old notebooks, I shared my first impression of him as some pretentious class clown, some egotistical attention whore. Avoid At All Costs! That was at freshman assembly. He wound up in my seminar (evening philosophy class), where he failed to disabuse me of my negative preconceptions by holding forth windily without saying much. Then one day, not long after that, this annoying character sat down at my table in the dining hall, across from me…unavoidable.
In person, he turned out to be disconcertingly warm and personable, even down-to-earth. Everything about him up close seemed to belie the impression he gave at a distance. Not only that, but he had the most beautiful almond-shaped green eyes I had ever seen, transparent and vulnerable-looking, with a glimmer of sadness in them. I felt a weakening flush when he met my eye. Uh oh.
At a weekend “coffeeshop party” (a rock dance party in the basement café for students) we wound up dancing together into the wee hours. I specifically remember grooving to “Play That Funky Music” with him, stealing his felt top hat and putting it on my head. He walked me back to my dorm room and kissed me briefly on the mouth before bidding me goodnight. I stood there watching him go, still wearing the hat, a smile spreading slowly across my astonished lips. No one but a friend’s mother had ever kissed me on the mouth before, and that obviously didn’t count.
Interestingly, in the days to come, I completely freaked out. I already had a terrible crush on someone utterly unobtainable, an exquisite little prude of an upperclassman named Titus who ran around with the all the pretty (if closeted) gay boys on campus. Titus was impossibly beautiful, and clearly not interested in me…and I had another golden opportunity to fall into one more hopeless obsession with an idealized god-man, which was familiar, or to start something with this far less perfect oddball of a fellow who might actually be interested in me.
The latter was unfamiliar — uncomfortable — an actual risk.
León took me out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant in town. My ambivalence was snowballing by that point. In brief, I blew it that night. I turned León down, pre-emptively, in a way that he found utterly insulting. When he was good and mad and not speaking to me, then suddenly I was filled with panic and regret. But of course.
It took some doing — apologies, tears, virtual prostrations — before he was willing to so much as spend time with me again. When he finally did, we wound up staying up most of the night in one of the campus common rooms by its huge stone fireplace, talking about our pasts and our worldviews and our fears and our dreams…the kind of Before Sunrise conversation I’d had with Jonathan on the tour bus. Nothing else happened that night, but on a subsequent evening in my dorm room, I confessed to having growing feelings for him, and he confessed to the same — and then he kissed me. Really kissed me. I had had no idea up until that point what exactly could happen in the body when lips met lips. I was innocent to the point of retarded. León had this incredibly sensuous mouth with soft, full pink lips, and he knew exactly what he was doing. He was the PhD of kissing. He flipped my switch. He turned the oven on. It’s all his fault, really. He awoke the slumbering beast.
After that, he pretty much owned me.
**
Before long I found out why León’s eyes looked sad, and why his humor tended to be of the gallows variety. His family’s secret burden was a mentally ill brother so miserable and self-destructive he had jumped in front of a truck to kill himself, but had succeeded only in needing 24/7 care in a hospital bed for the rest of his life. León’s was not a family that processed trauma together or openly; his cultured, old-country doctor father coped by making bleak existential jokes of the Woody Allen variety, and his mother was all brisk pragmatism.
In addition, I wasn’t León’s first love – that honor belonged to his high school girlfriend Michelle, with whom he had had a very passionate and volatile relationship. Their parting had been difficult. He still pined for her. I was jealous.
Nevertheless, we had a couple of happy months of relative reciprocity, although it pains me to think of the times, out walking in a group of friends, when I dropped or avoided his hand simply out of acute self-consciousness. He took it personally, but I was simply clueless about how to act, how to be a couple in public. I had never done it before. For his part, he would sometimes wound me with offhand but barbed jokes about women when we were hanging out with “the guys.” Typical adolescent posturing and inexperience, but I was tremendously vulnerable. It was, after all, my first relationship.
We did attend the college dances together, the formal “waltz parties” in the Great Hall, and I was seldom happier than when we were doing a breezy swing while Frank Sinatra crooned a tune like “Witchcraft.” The only time I was happier was when we were alone together in his messy, undecorated dorm room, on sheets that smelled of him, listening to Depeche Mode or Kate Bush and continuing my remedial tutorial on the birds and the bees. Thanksgiving week I could barely wait to get back to him after the break, hungry for the taste of him, running down the hall of his dormitory and waking him up from a nap. He was tousled and unshowered and redolent of his own skin. I wanted to eat him alive. I thought he was so beautiful, this skinny Argentinean boy from Omaha, with his wispy dark hair and sad eyes. I had forgotten all about Titus.
Everything changed after winter break. He had seen Michelle, and what had happened between them confused, angered, and upset him to the point that he didn’t think he could continue with me. He was violently jealous of Michelle, and furious with her for moving on, even though he appeared to have done exactly the same thing with me. In the following months, we would come together and apart several times. His flirtations with other women were excruciating for me to watch, but he seemed to feel I was unentitled to my own jealousy and was angered by it. León’s double standard! Doggedly I courted him, wrote him poems, pined away, listening to “our” music.
By the end of the school year, however, we, had kissed and made up. I was loath to go home for the summer.
**
The rest of the story has essentially been told already: girl loses boy.
Now girl has lost boy for good.
**
The grief has been complicated and intense. Complicated because the experience with Cheyenne scarred me deeply, intense because I was so young and impressionable and full of desperate longing. I loved León; I saw things about him he hid from others, and I hungered so hard to take away his pain that my ribs ached. I would listen to the gorgeous Depeche Mode song “Somebody,” a song to which he had introduced me, and yearn to be León’s Somebody. That Somebody with whom he shared his innermost thoughts and his intimate details, who helped him see things in a different light. I didn’t want him to turn into the bitter, lonely old man he fully expected to become.
What I understand now, at forty-three, is that only time and experience would temper and mellow the suffering he was grappling with when we were barely more than kids. I tried to make things better for him…and he chose someone who made him feel powerful (his explanation) instead. Who, after all, doesn’t want to be the rescuer? It’s always easier to see the other person as the needy one. It might have behooved me back then to need help more openly and often, and let León be the hero once in a while.
But back in the day, I believed I was ready to endure any amount of pain if it meant León wouldn’t have to. (I probably endured a lot of pain unnecessarily that didn’t do either of us a bit of good.) In the end, León survived all his youthful turbulence and tragedy, and got to leave the earth at the point of arrival at fulfillment in work and love, at actual contentment. Whereas I’m the one left struggling with vocation, singlehood, and this terrible grief, weeping at my kitchen table alone.
That fiercely loyal (and probably unhealthily selfless) nineteen-year-old would cry: So be it!
I’d been so worried about León. My worry, as it turns out, was unwarranted.
**
Unable to return to the brutality of fundraising calling for a week (don’t ask me how I’m going to pay next month’s rent), I took a long walk in the early autumn rain to the art-house theatre to see Midnight in Paris. It was a spirited, funny, and entertaining film not unlike Allen’s earlier work, free of the lethargy and dark redundancy I’d found in more recent films where he seemed to play the same one-note, never-satisfied protagonist.
What struck me most about the film’s time-traveling aspect was that it underscored how incredibly quickly time passes. I couldn’t help but think of how these once-vibrant partygoers and artists of 1920s Paris had long since grown old and died. In the present moment, here was the young Ernest Hemingway sitting before Owen Wilson’s Gil, drinking whisky and dispensing manly advice; the cessation of his existence seemed an unthinkable distance away. But in the morning, Gil would be in 2011, and Papa would be dust. Everything was so ephemeral.
It seems to me that my vivid memories of León could have happened yesterday, the intervening years have slipped by with such alarming speed. That first night after the news came, as I lay in bed sobbing, I said out loud, over and over, “I have got to change my life.”
**
Moving out of the late summer of young adulthood into the early autumn of middle age, I want to do so many things I haven’t done. And I don’t know how. Still living on the periphery like a nineteen-year-old student, I am always just few hundred dollars away from getting kicked out on the street. I send out inquiries and feelers this way and that toward the dreams that I have, and I tell myself that my small actions are baby steps toward the life I envision. But León’s death makes me wonder: am I doing enough? Am I stuck? Am I a coward? What would I do if I knew I had a week to live?
I know that at heart – my Canadian coach Lisa Lane Brown helped make this very clear to me – I don’t believe that I’m qualified, that I have what it takes to “make it.” I don’t have the requisite self-confidence or belief in myself to trust that I can make things happen. In a world increasingly framed as full of ferocious competition, the only thing I’m certain of is failure. I want to change this. I have to change this.
I have a stack of library books on my kitchen table right now about how to change the core negative beliefs you carry around about yourself that sabotage you. Even if they can’t help, I don’t imagine they’ll hurt. And maybe I’ll learn something.
Because if I’m going to keel over at the age of fifty from a massive brain aneurysm, I’d like to do it by the shores of the Mediterranean with my beloved husband by my side, and be mourned by the hundreds or even thousands of people who were helped by something I wrote.
The horror of death, said Norman Brown, is the horror of dying with unlived lives in our bodies.
I suppose that’s the bottom line.
___________________________
Note: the post title was taken from a poem by George Gordon, Lord Byron, one of León’s favorite poets. The full text can be found here.
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